EVERY election of recent years has thrown new words and phrases into the American-English lexicon. Credibility gap, wimp factor, vision thing, I am not a crook, read my lips. The past 10 days of foot-shootery are unusual in that they have presented Americans with a fiercely arcane selection to remember: tiny vote-specific pieces of esoteric knowledge which in normal times should have passed well under Joe Blow's radar.

There's Bakered , the term describing the process in which a lowly state paralegal is suddenly hit by an apparently unstoppable avalanche of vitriolic legalistic abuse from a former Secretary of State. And we've seen the rise of the Yuca , the Young Upscale Cuban American, a key group formed of those who are too young to remember exile from Fidel, and who hated the way Elián became a republican pawn, and who thus, highly unusually for Florido-Cubans, are Democrat voters. (Not to be confused with Lunchbucket Democrats - the blue-collar Gore vote which takes its lunch outside, as opposed to inside the country club). And there's been coast-to-coast fame for Broward County , previously registering only when hosting an ugly little execution.

Bloviators have made a welcome return to the language. To bloviate is, of course, to speak pompously; and there has been much bloviation of late. The term disappeared for decades last century but began to make a comeback in the Nineties and is now hardly out of the mouths of other bloviators.

But the most bizarre must surely be chad , the word for the little holes of punched paper (or, rather crucially, the non-existent little holes of un punched paper) which could swing the Florida vote. The origins are debated. Chad was, as older readers may remember, the original bald head that popped up from chalk-drawn wartime walls, bemoaning shortages with the caption 'Wot? No_' cigarettes, Spam, whatever. The OED says he may have been created by British cartoonist George Edward Chatterton. Later, he and the American legend 'Kilroy was here' met and married, and appeared on walls together. The word also appears much earlier, in the Scottish National Dictionary, defined as gravel or 'such small stones as form the bed of rivers' (1808) - and apparently the word was applied by a Scottish teletext operator during the First World War to the accumulations of paper discs from punched tapes.

Alternatively, the term came directly from America, from the 'Chadless keypunch', named after its inventor. This was a type of paper-punch which merely serrated paper in a half-moon rather than punching the whole little circle out: as these serrations were 'chadless', went the reasoning, the little circles left by alternative punches must be chads.

Whatever. All you really need to remember are the five types being examined by checkers at the moment to see if the vote counts. A dimple chad is a simple indentation. A pregnant chad or nipple chad bulges out but has not been punched through at any point. A hanging-door chad has one corner hanging off slightly; a swing-door chad has two corners hanging, and a tri-chad is one with three corners hanging off. So now you know.

The only shame is that no one has yet coined a '-gate' suffix, without which it seems no American political drama can be complete. How long, though, before we start to hear the word 'alligate' to become terminally chewed in Florida?